more stuff

Until I moved into my current apartment, I had never lived anywhere near as big, and never for very long either, so I didn’t have all that much crap. When I first moved here and put stuff in the closets and the bookcases and whatever, I had plenty of room left over.

That didn’t last all that long. One thing, I had just taken up art seriously, and all hobbies involve having lots of crap, and art is probably a little worse than the others because, instead of hauling the deer leftovers over to a little niche in the woods so that they can return to nature, you have to keep each and every one of your precious works of art. Lucky for me I do watercolors which stack nicely, instead of like pottery which does not.

When my mother left the family bungalow for her retirement home, my sister and I pretty much left everything in it, This was pretty smart but it was also out of sheer laziness. Maybe five years later I remembered that my mother had had a set of silver. She used to bring it out for like Thanksgiving, and I remember as a kid watching her polish it with some stinky stuff. I asked my sister about it, but she hadn’t plucked it. So I guess whoever bought the house got it. 

Maybe just as well, if my sister had taken it, it would have sat on some shelf somewhere in her kitchen, until she died and I guess one of my nephews would take it, and then he would die and so on. Is silver worth much money? Does anybody eat off silver anymore? I have no idea.

Stuff accumulates, and it doesn’t go where it is supposed to go, it goes on a table or maybe a shelf, maybe into some temporary place that becomes permanent. If you remember back when you first moved in, you had a plan. You walked around the house and you saw the space that you had and decided this would go here and that would go there. Sort of. There was stuff where you couldn’t figure out if it was this or that, and it went into some other place until you could decide where it should go, which you never did, because you have a life to live for Chrissake.

Every couple years it seems I go through all my stuff and organize it and the good thing is I always end up with extra space, and the bad thing is if I am looking for something obscure I can remember where it used to be, and I can remember that I moved it somewhere else, but at that point in the chain everything is blank. Well I will find it next time I organize my stuff. Probably.

It’s like the grocery store. Are the coffee filters with the coffee or with the paper towels? Actually they are somewhere else, and when the kindly grocery clerk points it out to you, you tuck it away into your memory, which is absolutely useless because by the time you use those 400 filters the grocery store will have decided it wants to move everything around.

I hate to say it, but the older we get, the more we get to thinking well how many more years do we have to be retrieving stuff, and doesn’t it give us a little more time to watch the sunset if we just put stuff wherever it falls, because eventually it will all fall into the hands of the kids who will whine what are we going to do with all this crap?

And anyway five million years from now the sun is going to turn into a red giant and burn everything up, and also our galaxy is going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy, and the scientists say it won’t be a big deal, but how can that be? You take a couple Ford galaxies and run them into each other and you will have a hell of a crash, and real galaxies are a lot bigger than Fords so it’ll probably be a huge crash. And anyway way down the road is the big rip which I think everything will just be tiny smears of energy in a big cold expanding universe so I guess there will be plenty of room to put stuff then.